I have a set of polygons in ArcGIS 10, which I want to label. Despite setting the Unplaced label icon to "on" and using an expression for the label (so that all objects should be labelled), not all objects are being labelled, whether using the standard label engine or Maplex.

I have tried reloading Arc, creating annotations, creating a new feature class, but nothing works. Has anyone else seen this behaviour?

Try using the standard labeling engine instead of Maplex; that seems to work quite well when attempting to label all features. Any chance some geometry is invalid (negative area and such)?
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JakubNov 14 '11 at 15:12

sorry, didn't see that before my last comment. Think it was geometry related, can't explain it though. Standard label engine didn't seem to make a difference
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Stev_kNov 14 '11 at 15:22

I also had the same problem. Repair Geometry worked for me as well. Thanks to all who replied. ArcToolbox -> Data Management Tools -> Features -> Repair Geometry
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user20488Jul 26 '13 at 20:06

The first point makes no difference, and re the second point, the only features in the annotation tables are those features which have been labelled by the label engine - i.e. no unplaced labels are included. It's all quite strange
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Stev_kNov 14 '11 at 14:52

hmm - very strange indeed. if you export the table (maybe just the fields causing trouble), can you see those values in a txt file? (thinking of special poblems like utf8 or strange formatting.)
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Brad NesomNov 14 '11 at 15:03

1

another idea. create xy values for centroid, export as dbf, then re-load as xy event, and label the points without symbology for points. ??
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Brad NesomNov 14 '11 at 15:04

That worked - I guess it must have been something to do with the polygons - very bizarre though. Thanks for the idea. Arc does seem to be very tempramental with labelling, which is strange.
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Stev_kNov 14 '11 at 15:14

Another NOTE is tha tif you have values with <NULL> value you can see the layer have problems labeling.
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Brad NesomOct 5 '12 at 17:53